AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
I think you're assuming a different context than really happens in a typical case, especially because this is a thing that I changed a few editions back.Please don't take this the wrong way, but....man, do you have thin-skinned players if a simple level loss is enough to make them drop from a game!
There really wasn't such a thing as "a simple level loss", because losing a level had impact on all kinds of things, ranging from increased chance of losing more levels because lower-level means more likely to die and death meant level loss, to how your character fits into the party because lower-level means less "oomph" and that can leave the character seeming like a "sidekick" rather than an equal (which is a bad thing if the player didn't sign-on to the idea of playing a sidekick sort of character).
And really, this comes down to preference. You're kind of telling someone that if they don't like the same difficulty setting that you do then they are "thin-skinned", which is kind of insulting.